Looks like I wasn't the only one thrown for a bit of a loop by the March 7 "Unaffordable Eden" cover. The Daily News has the full story, and I'm in it!

It's fun to have rivalries, but there's no need for a rumble between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Like Canadians, Brooklynites absorb two cultures automatically, without much choice in the matter. I think most people who live on this side of the river are fine with that; after all, many of us moved to Manhattan first. In my experience, Brooklynites tend to see New York City as a city, so they aren't afraid to go to a movie in Queens or a bar in Staten Island. A number of diehard Manhattanites I know are afraid to leave the island, as though the F, V, N, R, W, 4, 5, A, C, E, 2, 3, 7, J, M, Z, L, and Q trains led to unmapped territory, marked Here Be Dragons.

I still think Marcellus Hall's drawing is wonderful, but he should know better than to divide New York into Paradise and despair. Ben Greenman and Francoise Mouly, in the New Yorker cover-gallery supplement "The Big City," wrote that "New Yorkers have always harbored the suspicion that people who live in other places are only joking." Absolutely! But New Yorker readers and writers (and, I suspect, a good number of their cartoonists) live all over the city, which obviously includes Brooklyn. Cross the bridge sometime—you might like it! It's an awfully nice walk.

Speaking of the Q train, I think it was the Daily News that published one of my favorite poems of all time, by the winner of a New York City high school poetry contest:

My hair all big
My jeans all tight
Perfumed all over
In the right mood.
Thinking of your kiss
Your sweet words to me
Q train, put on some speed.

Now that is a love poem. If anyone can tell me the name of the poet—I've been searching for it for years—I'd be thrilled. Even better would be the actual Poetry in Motion subway poster. I hope this girl has gone far.

Manhattan king? Fuhgeddaboudit! [Daily News]
The BMT El in 1924, a year before The New Yorker was founded [NYC Subway]
New York's Poetry in Motion poems [Poetry Society of America; added 1/30/06. But where is "Hair All Big"?]